The Chedi Luštica Bay

The peninsula sits on the outer edge of the Bay of Kotor, the last stretch of Montenegrin coast before the open Adriatic. Luštica Development, an Orascom company, has been raising a whole town here since the middle of the last decade: a marina, a promenade, pale houses with terracotta roofs stepping up the slope, a golf course on the hill, a second village going up behind. It is the youngest of the country's new marina addresses, after Porto Montenegro in Tivat and Portonovi further out towards the sea, and for now it is the most relaxed of the three.

The Chedi opened in the summer of 2018, the first hotel of the town and the anchor of its quay. A long, pale building runs the length of the marina, five floors of rooms looking over the yachts to the mouth of the bay. Because it came first, it fixed the scale, and nothing since has been allowed to rise over it. You arrive to a place that is still half construction and half finished postcard, which is honest, and which will change. For now the promenade is calm and the hills behind it are bare.

The Chedi is a GHM name, the small group that built the original in Muscat and has kept the brand deliberately short. The idea travels well. The materials are quiet ones, terrazzo underfoot and oak at the edges, and the lobby stays cool and dim while the light hammers down on the quay outside. The colour is left to the sea in the windows and to the hand-blown glass lamps, green and orange and teal, that hang beside every bed.

There are a hundred and eleven rooms and suites, most of them with a balcony and the marina in front. They are lighter and more playful than the brand's Asian houses, a patterned curtain, a fretwork panel above the bed, a rug the colour of the shallows, though the restraint underneath is the same. The hotel holds a Leading Hotels of the World membership and one Michelin Key, the guide's mark for a stay worth the journey. Downstairs the spa runs long and low-lit, an indoor pool under an arched window, treatments drawn in the brand's manner from Bali, India and Tibet. It is a great deal of stillness to build on a coast this new.

Five kitchens share the quay, more than a hotel this size usually needs, and they divide up the day rather than fight over it. The Restaurant does the long Chedi breakfast, bread baked in-house and a mimosa bar for people in no hurry to leave. The Spot sits right on the marina and cooks the Adriatic, the fish and the wine both close to home. The Japanese, which opened in 2025, took the first floor and the same view of the water. The Lobby Bar keeps a patisserie corner and a wall of gin, and down on the sand the Rok Beach Bar runs a pizza oven and a rock terrace for the long end of the afternoon.

You could eat a week here without repeating yourself, which is rare outside the big city hotels and rarer still on a shore where most kitchens are only now finding their feet. What we have read and seen of the cooking suggests it trusts its materials more than it dresses them, which on this coast is the right instinct. We have not sat at these tables ourselves, so we hold that lightly.